President’s Blog: Walk(man) on Bye(bye)

Back in the day when my running game was a daily obsession (yes, that’s true, let it be a lesson to everyone!), I spent long boring hours pounding the pavement in Georgetown and out along the gravel of the C&O Canal wishing I could hear real music rather than the tunes that just played over and over in my head. I was desperate to banish “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing” from my inner hi-fi!

At least that was the theory. In reality, being a starving young public interest lawyer in 1979 when the Walkman first came out, I could hardly afford the $150 pricetag. I waited for the cheaper imitations. Scraping together $29.95 to buy a no-name “personal stereo” to run with, I then went in search of cassette tapes.

Yes, kids, tapes. We did not “download.” We bought cassettes. The smarter guys knew how to make “mix tapes” but most of us just went to Sam Goody’s. What’s that? Oh, lordy, I am digging the hole of age here…. Well, Sam Goody’s was a record store. What’s a record? Ok, I see we need an even more complete history lesson. Trust me. You first got music from a vinyl record. Then from something called 8-tracks. Then from a wonderful modern invention called a cassette tape. There were entire stores with acres of beautifully illustrated albums. Albums? Think Best Buy with nothing but larger versions of CDs… oh, sorry, CDs are also going away. Sigh. Who has time to learn this stuff?

Anyway, I took my cheap cassette player out running with a “best of the 70′s” tape. The music was jerky, the tape bounced around.

My running game did not improve. But my inner hi-fi at least changed channels once in a while.

Apple rules, though some of us still resist iAnything. I did recently discover that my Blackberry can also play music, who knew? So I created a little playlist. Really little. Just about 40 songs, real oldies.